art & too much wine: a tuesday night at the hay hill gallery

A colleague at work v.kindly invited Mitch and I to the private viewing of her partner's show at the Hay Hill Gallery on Baker Street. Not having been to a private viewing (nor the gallery) before, curiosity and the wish to show support meant that I RSVP: Oui!

It's a lovely gallery, a 5 minute walk from the tube station with floor to ceiling windows encouraging you step inside. Once we ditched our coats and were given some wine, we took a wander around the gallery.

The title of the 14 piece collection was: "The Financial Crisis Show: Art as a Derivative". Which did sound a little dry on paper but on canvas they were great! As you may know, I'm a sucker for colourful geometric shapes, lines, repeating patterns etc - so these certainly appealed to me from a distance (and especially as a collective). But, once I got close enough to read some of the 1,500 or so words on each painting, I realised that they also appealed to my love of a good quote. Yes, these were quotes relating to finance, wall street, bad loans and the like, but they were poignant and some were rather amusing ("Mr Perkins is an extreme risk to the market when he is drunk" - was a favourite).

After listening to the artist give a succinct and interesting speech about his work (whilst quaffing our third glass of wine) we decided to explore the lower floor of the gallery where this painting caught my eye. It was completely made out of wax - crazy eh?

Also downstairs we saw this painting and, egged on by another gallery-goer, decided to take some pictures with it. I sincerely hope the artist wasn't in the room.

Clearly we were in need of some dinner to soak up the booze. With hurried goodbyes and a short walk down Blandford Street, we found ourselves outside Pieds Nus. A teeny tiny little place with a tasty sounding menu and stripped back decor. On offer: a varied selection of small, tapas like dishes, but, as we soon discovered, the flavours (and ingredients) were very big indeed. We opted for the bread selection (avec hummus) to start, followed by the salt baked artichoke, wild mushrooms and truffle supplement (I'm still not entirely sure what that is but this dish was divine). Next we had the scallops followed by the spiced lamb neck with aubergine purée - ohmygod it was amazing. Melt-in-your-mouth, drooling-about-it-now (two days later) amazing. Can you guess it was my favourite of all the dishes that night (in spite of my guilt at eating lamb - something I haven't done for over a year)? To round off the dinner we shared the Tart Tatin which was v.nice up until I crunched down on a big star anise. It was pretty gross, particularly as I hate the taste of liquorice.

source

It was expensive, or what I would deem expensive, but the flavours (save for the star anise) were insanely good. I looked it up when we got home and it turns out that Pieds Nus is actually a pop-up from the owner of two michelin starred restaurants!

So Tuesday turned out to be a rather fancy affair. I do love it when a lack of planning leads to fun new things :)

Hope you're all having a good week!